by Jack Cashill
Published in WorldNetDaily.com - January 28,2010

In the same week that the state of Kansas was trying the admitted killer of late-term abortionist George Tiller, its judicial establishment was continuing to hound the man who almost brought Tiller to justice, former attorney general Phill Kline.

The January 19th lead in the Kansas City Star captures the giddy spirit of the hounding, “Phill Kline disobeyed the Kansas Supreme Court, misled judges and withheld information from a grand jury, according to an ethics complaint made public Tuesday.”

To understand how thorough is the corruption of the mainstream media’s on the life issue, please see this short but shocking video on last week’s March For Life:

The state Supreme Court has been hectoring Kline for years. One earlier sanction was so gratuitous that it prompted the Court’s chief justice, Kay McFarland, to publicly scold her colleagues.

McFarland chastised the court majority for using the sanction to “denigrate Kline for actions that it cannot find to have been in violation of any law and to heap scorn upon him for his attitude and behavior that does not rise to the level of contempt."

Not surprisingly, the Kansas City Star failed to notice McFarland’s comments. It cheerfully headlined the sanction, “ Phill Kline gets smacked around by the Kansas Supreme Court.”

The case against Kline, however expensive and insulting, is not exactly closed. Buried deep in the 22,000-page blizzard of paperwork that the state has thrown against Kline and his colleagues Eric Rucker and Steve Maxwell is an eye-opening document.

Unearthed during the course of discovery, this document has the potential to exonerate the three and expose the depth of the state’s skullduggery.

In the way of background, the oddly liberal Kansas legal establishment has not forgiven Kline for daring to investigate the state’s unnaturally prosperous late-term abortion business.

Despite Kansas’s tough anti-abortion laws, Tiller in Wichita and, to a lesser degree, Planned Parenthood in suburban Kansas City had made Kansas the late-term abortion capital of the world.

Elected attorney general in 2002, Kline chose to investigate why this was so. True to form, the state’s abortion industry, its judiciary, and its media worked to derail his investigation at every turn, but Kline chugged on.

In 2006, anxious about the future of his unholy business, Tiller pumped an estimated $1.2 million into the campaign to defeat the Republican Kline in his re-election bid.

That same year, Planned Parenthood’s awarded The Star its top national journalistic honor--named “The Maggie” in honor of PP’s eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger--for its shrill and ultimately successful editorial help in unseating Kline.

While the new Democratic AG worked to undo the charges Kline had brought against Tiller, the good doctor got back to business, and hundreds of healthy unborn babies from around the world paid the price.

In 2008, Tiller’s last full year of practice, a full 98 percent of the late term abortions in Kansas were performed on women from out of state or out of country.

Even with Tiller now out of the picture, the continued harassment of Kline and his colleagues serves as a reminder to would-be prosecutors that the abortion industry is not to be messed with.

This message is surely intended for Steve Howe, the Johnson County Republican district attorney who has inherited the case Kline opened against Planned Parenthood.

Still, for all their success in smearing Kline and scaring local prosecutors, the abortion industry and its allies ought not begin their end zone dance just yet.

Although the media have chosen not to notice, a motion filed by Eric Rucker, Kline’s former chief of staff, shines some useful light on a document that someone hoped would remain in the dark.

As the document reveals, upon receiving a formal complaint against Kline and his colleagues by abortion industry attorneys, the state Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Administrator commissioned a pair of investigators to review the charges.

According to the report filed on May 21, 2008, the investigators, both attorneys, spent 55 hours on the case, reviewed all relevant documents, and spoke to all concerned parties.

“It is the opinion of these investigators that there is not a probable cause to prove Phill Kline violated any of the rules of ethics,” said the attorneys rather conclusively.

“In arriving at this conclusion,” the report continued, “investigators gave particular weight to findings made by Judge [Richard] Anderson, including the finding that Attorney General Phill Kline stands on ‘firm legal ground that the clinics have failed to comply with [state law.]’”

The report went on to clear Kline of violating non-disclosure rules or pursuing cases without probable cause and sums up with what should have been obvious to all from the beginning: “The complaint arises from strenuous legal battles between opposing counsel and was complicated by a very hotly contested political race.”

In their motion, Rucker and his attorney question whether the state Disciplinary Administrator bothered sharing this exculpatory report with the Review Committee that would ultimately find probable cause to proceed against Rucker, Kline and Maxwell.

In addition, Rucker’s motion questions whether the Review Committee was allowed to see the rulings by two district judges who had previously cleared Kline of ethics complaints.

Although left unsaid, the motion raises the question of intent. Did the state overlook the exculpatory document or bury it? And if the latter, who did the burying and why?

The Rucker motion does ask for names. Stay tuned.

Who is Jack Cashill?